I finished The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht a few weeks ago, but I’ve been so bogged down trying to finish up my book club’s April selection (stay tuned for review) that I haven’t had a chance to write it up yet. What does that mean for you lucky Cannonballers? You’ll be able to read my review in a quick glance, because I’ll have no choice but to be brief. I’ve already forgotten most of my thoughts on the book. Oops.
Ostensibly, The Tiger’s Wife is about a young doctor named Natalia in a fictional war-ravaged eastern European country** trying to provide adequate healthcare to a group of children. She has just recently lost her grandfather to cancer, and intermixed with her present-day story, we learn about her grandfather’s history and the two stories he’s told her growing up. There are mixed reviews for this novel on Goodreads. And the naysayers may have a point… ‘What is this book even about?’ was a question that often hit me while reading. But funnily enough, the rambling nature of the narrative, the seemingly unimportant aspects of Natalia’s everyday life, and the non-chronological nature of the story didn’t bother me at all. I believe that Obreht’s writing is quite lovely; a nice turn of phrase can definitely assuage negative feelings one may have when one reaches the end of a story and has no idea what just happened.
The two stories from Natalia’s grandfather are the meat of this novel. One revolves around the “deathless man” her grandfather met as a young doctor in a remote village. The other around a tiger, escaped from her city’s zoo during bombings in WWII, who comes to live outside his village as a young boy. Both are very fairy tale-like in theme and perhaps that’s why I enjoyed the novel so much and was able to forgive the flaws a lot of reviewers see here.
To be honest: yes, Natalia’s story is almost inconsequential, there is very little plot outside the two grandfather tales, and there isn’t really any denouement. However, the journey through the book was a pleasant one and I heartily enjoyed it.
**The place is probably based on Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, etc. Forgive my ignorance of their history… I, much like Cher Horowitz, thought those places were Middle Eastern for most of the 90s because I was too young to care about news. And I am incredibly terrible at geography.
I was one of those mixed reviews! I really liked the grandfather’s tales, they felt like fairy tales but I just didn’t like anything dealing with Natalia.
I had read about the author before I started the novel (and was using it for a European reading challenge), so I knew that Obreht was from Belgrade, which helped for context. I am aware of bits of history but missing large chunks of time and detail. I remember when I was younger, there was a journal by a thirteen old girl from Sarajevo that basically everyone was reading (this was in Germany, so Jugoslavia was actually a bit of a beach vacation spot before the war).